Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, November 18, 2013

Five years after the financial crash, most congressional Democrats seem content to live with the status quo. They tackled financial reform in 2010 when they passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and they'd prefer to leave the nitty-gritty details of keeping banks in check to federal agencies rather than pass new legislation.

But Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) won't be so easily assuaged. On Tuesday, she delivered a speech to a room full of academics, consumer advocates, and Senate aides that criticized federal regulators for failing to meet the deadlines to write rules regulating banks, as outlined in Dodd-Frank. "Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act?" she said. "I thought that if the regulators failed, it was time for Congress to step in. That's what oversight means. And that's certainly a principle that would have served our country well prior to the crisis."

In 1494, Spain and Portugal were in serious competition over other peoples’ lands. This bothered the church, and Pope Alexander VI made it his duty to write up the Treaty of Tordesillas, which dictated that Spain was free to attempt to conquer lands west of an imaginary line on the Atlantic, and Portugal could attempt the same for all lands east of that line, essentially creating Eastern and Western hemispheres.

A little more than two decades later, Spain’s influence in what it thought was a new world grew nearly as much as its avarice. It wanted more lands, and all the resources that came with those lands. Ferdinand Magellan, who was Portuguese, offered his services to King Charles of Spain. His plan was to sail west, as the treaty obliged—but to sail so far west that he would essentially reach the Eastern Hemisphere, and attempt to conquer those lands for Spain. He eventually landed in what we now call the Philippines.

Allow me a further deepening of my Nation article, reposing now on newsstands, on the continues between conservatives of decades past and today. It concerns the historic entanglement of big-business and conservatism. A recent media narrative suggests signs of a divorce between the these longtime lovers. “Business Groups See Loss of Sway Over House G.O.P.,” reports The New York Times—so they’re thinking about primaries against Tea Party congressmembers. “We’re looking at ways to counter the rise of an ideological brand of conservatism that, for lack of a better word, is more anti-establishment than it has been in the past,” says a lobbyist at the National Retail Federation. “We have come to the conclusion that sitting on the sidelines is not good enough.” ThinkProgress broke out the champagne: “GOP CIVIL WAR ERUPTS!!!!”

Robert Booker admits that he didn't really need the money he
got from drug dealing. He grew up in a two-parent, middle-class family
in Detroit in the 1970s, and his job as a lifeguard for the city's parks
department paid "good money." But the drug business paid more, and by
the late 1980s nearly all of his friends were showing up to the pool
with new cars and expensive sneakers. "I was smarter than the average
cat, and I was like, 'If they could do it, I could do it easy,'" Booker
said by phone on Monday from the Federal Correctional Institution in
Schuylkill, Pa. "I left lifeguarding and started hanging around."

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans filibustered another one of
President Barack Obama's nominees on Tuesday: Nina Pillard, a Georgetown
University law professor and a noncontroversial nominee to the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Senate voted 56 to 41 on a procedural motion for Pillard, falling
short of the 60 votes needed to bring her confirmation vote to the
floor. Only two Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan
Collins (Maine), sided with Democrats to let her proceed.

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warned in a speech Tuesday that the problem of banks considered "too big to fail" has only gotten worse since the 2008 financial crisis, potentially sowing the seeds of a future crisis.

"Today, the four biggest banks are 30 percent larger than they were five years ago. And the five largest banks now hold more than half of the total banking assets in the country," Warren said in a keynote address at a conference on the future of financial reform put on by the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank. "Who would have thought five years ago, after we witnessed firsthand the dangers of an overly concentrated financial system, that the 'too big to fail' problem would only have gotten worse?"

LAKETON,NB–A heavy RCMP presence is in an area Tuesday where a Houston-based energy company is expected to resume its controversial shale gas exploration.

About 30 people from Elsipogtog and their supporters have set up a camp near Hwy 11 by Laketon, NB., where SWN Resources is expected to begin laying down geophones in preparation for seismic testing set for Wednesday.

The exploration area is about 46 kilometres north of Elsipogtog First Nation.